Meanwhile in Canada, they're building Malls

[pseudo3d]

The weather is probably also a factor. There is higher demand for indoor malls in places where it is too cold to walk around outdoors for a portion of the year.

That was always supposed to be the saving grace of malls, but it doesn't work that way----look at all the dead enclosed malls we have regardless of region, whereas many of the open-air 50s strips have lived on, as long as they had the demographics to support mid-to-upper income shopping; those complexes were able to adapt to new kinds of retail malls did not. Toronto's climate isn't much different from Chicago's and two of the most successful Chicago area malls, Old Orchard and Oakbrook were never enclosed. Michigan Avenue lives on as a shopping street while the malls along it all have faltered.

One difference in the Canadian malls is that they always had a wider array of stores than in the US. The homogenization of malls in terms of price points and apparel-related merchants is one of the many things that doomed them. If all malls seem to have the same stores it's easy for people to change loyalties if a new, bigger mall opens or an existing one seems to be in decline. The absence of new "mall stores" or stores that easily could go in a lifestyle center, even megamalls wind up with vacancies.

When the GFC hit, there was talk of adding more supermarkets to malls, yet I've never actually seen that in practice. What mostly ended up happening is some Sears stores sub-leased space to Whole Foods Market, but then those stores didn't even open into the mall.